Mum Shares Her Miraculous Survival After She Was Bitten By Deadly Funnel Web Spider

A mother has spoken for the first time about the horrific moment she was bitten by a deadly funnel web spider and her incredible battle for survival.

Fiona Donagh, 51, from the Southern Highlands, New South Wales, Australia, was asleep in her bed on Boxing Day when she felt something crawling up her right leg at around 3 o’clock in the morning.

“I’d had a couple of glasses of bubbly that evening being Christmas time, so I went to bed and woke up some time and went to the loo. I came back to bed and was almost asleep again”¦ and I actually felt something going up my right leg, I felt something crawl up my right leg and it did not feel at all familiar to me,” she explained.

Then, what happened next almost cost her her life.

“My reaction was to actually to kick my legs and arms in the air and that’s when I felt it. It must have run or jumped very quickly to my torso and to under my left breast and I felt a very sharp pain and I knew I’d been bitten,” she said.

The crawler was actually a five-centimetre wide male funnel web spider – six times more toxic than a female – and one of the world’s most deadly spiders with a bite that can kill in just 15 minutes.

“Afterwards I discovered it had also bitten me on my upper left arm but I didn’t feel that one immediately because the bite on my torso was so painful and so shocking,” Fiona said.

She described the pain as something “like a blue bottle jellyfish sting.” She said that after only a matter of seconds, the bite became a burning sensation right across her torso, “like it was on fire.”

Fiona then ran into the kitchen and grabbed a glass mixing bowl to place over the top of the crawler on the bed, so she could identify the creature. “Something about growing up in Australia you hear a lot about spiders and snakes and I guess I’d heard from when I was younger that one of the most important things is correct identification. So even though this has never happened to me before, and normally I wouldn’t go near a spider because I’m arachnophobic, I knew I needed to do something and trap it,” she said.

Feeling the toxins go through her body, Fiona said she fought it to stay alive for her son Oscar, whose father Steve had passed away when he was just three-months old.

She said that as she looked at herself in the mirror, she could see the red rash, similar to a sunburn, across her torso, had already spread to her body in just a minute. She then woke her sister who was staying with them to tell her she had been bitten, but hesitated to call Triple Zero as she wasn’t sure what spider had bitten her.

After only 30 minutes, the intense pain of bites on her torso and one on her left arm had developed into severe muscle spasms, sweating, excess saliva production and confusion, and Fiona collapsed on the sofa as paramedics arrived to her home.

The deadly spider – which has since been dubbed Yorick – was brought along with Fiona in the ambulance to milk him of anti-venom in Bowral then Liverpool hospitals where doctors administered four shots of anti-venom in an effort to save her life.

After receiving the anti-venom, Fiona almost instantly recovered, but on the evening of the 27th December, she began to have difficulty breathing. When a cardiologist checked her, the doctor discovered that only 30 percent of her heart was functioning, and the left side of her heart had completely stopped. “This sent them all into a bit of a flurry, and I was moved to the acute ICU ward and when a cardiologist came to see me he said I had essentially had a heart attack,” she said.

Fiona was monitored until she was well enough to be eventually sent home. Wasting no time, she immediately booked a pest control to spray her home.

She said that she and her sister think that the funnel web spider must have been caught up in the washing her sister brought in the day she was bitten that she put on the bed.

Meanwhile, Yorick, the funnel web spider, caught so much interest in the hospital. Fiona said that some people noticed he was looking “a bit down” because he had no air in the jar where he was kept, so one of the nurses poked some holes on top using a syringe but she poked so forcefully that she stabbed Yorick and it died. Fiona eventually took the spider home with her as a memento.

Now, Fiona’s latest heart tests came back and almost miraculously her heart function has been recorded as perfectly normal and all signs of coronary disease had gone.

Sources: Au.be.yahoo.com and Kidspot.com.au